Brooks Life Science Systems, a division of Brooks Automation, Inc., a leading worldwide provider of automation solutions for compound and biological sample storage and management, has announced the commercial launch of the Brooks Plate Auditor™, a fast, accurate and non-invasive tool for identification of precipitate and empty wells in compound and screening plates. The new Plate Auditor is the result of a successful collaboration with the Scripps Research Institute.

The new Plate Auditor is designed to evaluate the quality of microplate-based compound samples for precipitation and liquid volume prior to use in compound management and high throughput screening activities. The system rapidly analyzes plates to automatically verify sample integrity thus eliminating the need for extensive manual quality control.

“The contents of a plate are a fingerprint for all of the potential problems you encounter in a Compound Management operation; Plate Auditor allows easy and rapid detection of many of those problems using machine vision and sophisticated image processing”, stated Peter Hodder, PhD, Senior Director and Head of Lead Identification at the Florida campus of Scripps Research. The ability of the instrument to provide sample color information makes the Plate Auditor a unique option for monitoring sample quality over time, and identifying wells with artifacts which may interfere with or invalidate screening results.

The Plate Auditor is being showcased at the MipTec Drug Discovery Conference, 24-27 September 2012, in Basel, Switzerland. Data highlighting how Plate Auditor enhances compound testing integrity was presented at the recent IQPC Compound Management and Integrity Conference, in Boston, MA, US.

In February 2012 Brooks announced the collaboration with the Scripps Research Institute to develop and commercialize the Plate Auditor instrument. “We are delighted to have worked with the Scripps Research Institute’s compound management group to bring the new Plate Auditor so rapidly to the market,” commented John Lillig, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of Brooks Life Science Systems.